Quacks Like a Lame Duck

It's so interesting to see Dallas Mayor Laura Miller pop up on TV now. She was on twice in the last 24 hours--while in Washington lobbying for the Wright Amendment and then touring power plants with Sarah Dodd of Channel 11. I thought, "Oh, yeah! Laura Miller! I was wondering whatever happened to her." Isn't that interesting?

Because Laura Miller's not doing anything that different from what she always did. The only difference, now she's doing it as a lame duck. She announced she will not run again for mayor. So next year when her term ends, she's out.

She's still up to mischief. People were calling me up saying they couldn't understand why she wanted to screw up the consensus on the city council by insisting on an even lower tax rate than the already reduced rate the council was proposing. I said, "C'mon! That's easy. Because it's fun for her. It's to make trouble. To goose them, make the rest of them squirm a little so they have to explain why they don't want to cut taxes as much as she does."

People would say, "What's the strategy?" I would say, "Asked and answered."

So she's still doing what she does. Which I like. I like trouble. It puts the fizz in my soda. But if she's still doing what she does, why does she seem so strangely irrelevant all of a sudden, like a disappeared person?

It's that lame duck thing. Shootin' blanks. And that's a reflection on us, not her. But it's kind of what it is, isn't it?

She's not going to stay gone. She can't stand this. She's gonna get herself a job with some real bullets again, you watch. Like I need coffee in the morning, she needs pink mist. I just know it. --Jim Schutze